'Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill were bestselling writers who told of life in the vast Australian interior. Daisy Bates, dressed in Victorian garb, malnourished and half-blind, camped with Aboriginal people in Western Australia and on the Nullarbor for decades, surrounded by her books, notes and artefacts. A self-taught ethnologist, desperate to be accepted by established male anthropologists, she sought to document the language and customs of the people who visited her camps. In 1935, Ernestine Hill, journalist and author of The Great Australian Loneliness, coaxed Bates to Adelaide to collaborate on a newspaper series. Their collaboration resulted in the 1938 international bestseller, The Passing of the Aborigines. This book informed popular opinion about Aboriginal people for decades, though Bates's failure to acknowledge Hill as her co-author strained their friendship.
'Traversing great distances in a campervan, Eleanor Hogan reflects on the lives and work of these indefatigable women. From a contemporary perspective, their work seems quaint and sentimental, their outlook and preoccupations dated, paternalistic and even racist. Yet Bates and Hill took a genuine interest in Aboriginal people and their cultures long before they were considered worthy of the Australian mainstream's attention. With sensitivity and insight, Hogan wonders what their legacies as fearless female outliers might be.' (Publication summary)
Dedication :
To my mother, Enid Gordon, for introducing me to Australian women writers from the interwar period, and to my father, Roger Hogan, for sharing his love of bushwalking and camping, and never being afraid to take the family Kingswood down an unsealed road.
'Despite its extremes, Mparntwe Alice Springs still maintains a grip'
'Eleanor Hogan’s Into the Loneliness is a detailed and engaging biographical work. It will be of great interest to academic and professional historians – and members of the wider public – concerned with twentieth-century Australian cultural history and the settler-colonial inheritance in (and beyond) Australia. As well as being an important addition to the literature on Daisy Bates, Hogan’s book makes two other, major contributions: it represents the most comprehensive piece of biographical research on journalist and travel writer, Ernestine Hill; it is also the most thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature, circumstances and products of the collaboration between Bates and Hill (which produced the ‘My Natives and I’ articles and The Passing of the Aborigines).' (Introduction)
'This rich book charts the complex relationship between two iconic Australian women of the mid-20th century: Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill. Journalists and writers, Bates’s and Hill’s life stories are set against the “great Australian loneliness” of the outback. It is a masterful act of storytelling that is beautifully written, and readers are drawn into an intimacy with the subjects.' (Introduction)
'Into the Loneliness is the story of two Australian women, opposites in temperament, who eschewed the conventional roles expected of women of their eras, lived unconventional lives, and produced books that influenced the culture and imagination of twentieth-century Australia. The book focuses on their complicated friendship, and on Ernestine Hill’s role in assisting Daisy Bates to produce the manuscript that was published in 1938 as The Passing of the Aborigines, which became a bestseller in Australia and Britain. Hill, a successful and popular journalist, organised the anthropological material and ghost-wrote much of the book, for which Bates privately expressed her gratitude, while not acknowledging it publicly.' (Introduction)
'In the thirties, Ernestine Hill humped a swag from Broome to the Territory, and south to Port Augusta, writing travel features for southern newspapers. About the same time, Daisy Bates had been camped for a decade at the soak at Ooldea, studying Aboriginal people on the edge of the Nullarbor plain. Into the Loneliness is an engrossing portrait of these two women whose vocation led them to live unconventional nomadic lives.' (Introduction)
'This rich book charts the complex relationship between two iconic Australian women of the mid-20th century: Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill. Journalists and writers, Bates’s and Hill’s life stories are set against the “great Australian loneliness” of the outback. It is a masterful act of storytelling that is beautifully written, and readers are drawn into an intimacy with the subjects.' (Introduction)
'Eleanor Hogan’s Into the Loneliness is a detailed and engaging biographical work. It will be of great interest to academic and professional historians – and members of the wider public – concerned with twentieth-century Australian cultural history and the settler-colonial inheritance in (and beyond) Australia. As well as being an important addition to the literature on Daisy Bates, Hogan’s book makes two other, major contributions: it represents the most comprehensive piece of biographical research on journalist and travel writer, Ernestine Hill; it is also the most thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature, circumstances and products of the collaboration between Bates and Hill (which produced the ‘My Natives and I’ articles and The Passing of the Aborigines).' (Introduction)
'Despite its extremes, Mparntwe Alice Springs still maintains a grip'
